


Bruised Fruit

by willowbilly



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood Drinking, Body Horror, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Food Issues, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Late Night Conversations, Mutual Pining, Secrets, Self-Harm, Starvation, Teen Years, The Blatant Objectification of a Plum, Trish Being a Literal Lifesaver, Unrequited Love, Weird Biology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 08:07:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8242325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: Trish is alive, pulses with life, vibrant, real. She cares. At least a little. She... she could give Jessica what she needs, could make her okay again. Would it really be so awful to ask?





	

An entire family dies in a tragic motorway accident.

Later that night Jessica Jones' corpse wakes screaming in a morgue right as she's about to be bagged and tagged. A doctor is first threatened with a nearby bone saw, then bribed with the key to a safety deposit box holding all of the Jones' emergency in-case-we-need-to-disappear funds... which gets rid of that avenue but fuck it, she's desperate and doesn't know what the hell else to do, and Jessica is subsequently declared miraculously alive and released into the custody of the State, and later to Dorothy Walker, with a bill of perfect health, a stethoscope having never come near her chest.

The incident is widely hailed as a miracle.

Jessica knows better. Is the only one who knows, now that her family's heads have all been crushed courtesy of a backseat squabble and a semi-truck. It's just freaky undead biology, halle-fucking-lujah.

 

~~~

 

She notices the bruises on Trish's throat the first time they meet, even before Trish's scarf slips and she tells Jessica, her voice quavering only barely as she admonishes, “Don't you know it's rude to stare?”

She can smell the coolness of burst vessels and dead blood trapped tender beneath the skin, sees the way Trish stares straight ahead in the car, unseeing. She misses her own family so much she curls over her knees in the backseat and presses her fists against her empty stomach, pushing like she can reach in and shove the grief out from under her rib cage. She's never felt this alone before, this much of a stranger, different, lost, _other._

She figures she'd better start getting used to it.

 

~~~

 

Trish finds out.

It takes a few weeks. Weeks of interminable hunger gnawing at Jessica's stomach, an itching dryness desiccating her throat, making the soft tissues rough, making the walls of her esophagus spasm and stick together every time she swallows, turning her tongue to cotton batting, until she avoids talking lest she part her cracked, pale lips, so shrunken they seem riddled with barbed-wire shadows, and let the air suck out what last vestiges of moisture she has lingering behind bone-dry fangs.

She's not ready to fend for herself. She doesn't know how her parents procured the blood which filled their fridge, and she's locked out from the legitimate savings left to her in their will until she's of age.

So she withers. She lifts her shirt up in front of the mirror and walks her fingers up and down her increasingly prominent ribs as though tapping piano keys. Her eyes look huge and dull in her white face, shadowed with bruise-like purple bags, and her hair begins to go wild and brittle, constantly crackling with sparks of static. She finds black strands webbing her pillow when she wakes up, clogging the drain when she showers, matting the brush she accidentally breaks with her waning, uncoordinated strength, though her hair's growth has also sped up enough that at least she's not got any bald spots yet, thank god for paltry favors; vellus hair likewise begins to fuzz her gaunt body, a last-ditch effort at wrapping her in some useless layer of warmth, of protection against the big bad world. Her limbs shake and she begins to burn in sunlight despite long sleeves, a hood, and the ridiculously high SPF sunblock she slathers over every exposed inch, the day painful even with the stupid aviator shades she refuses to remove at school if she's anywhere near a window, and she moves like an old woman with osteoporosis, afraid of falling.

“Do you have cancer or something?” Trish asks at one point. Her mother is content to overlook Jessica's sickliness, pretend that everything is hunky-dory, but Trish has started to watch her, hawklike, her eyes sharp and suspicious and begrudgingly worried.

Jessica scoffs, lightly, through her nose, and shakes her head derisively, mutely, before shouldering Trish out of the way and slamming the door to her room behind her.

She leans back against the door, then, and listens to Trish shifting on the other side. Breathing. Her heart, beating. Something thoughtless and greedy and primal within Jessica is rousing, taking notice, zeroing in.

The roots of her fangs have begun to ache, pulsing like there's a nervous system, a brain, at the base of each one, and each brain has the mother of all migraines. Her rubbery gums have shrunk, creeping back from the enamel, making her teeth feel longer in her mouth, ill-fitting, and she clenches them now but it does not dispel the illusion. Her fingernails, even, seem sharper; thick, ridged keratin which grow in broad, clawlike curls from their shallow beds, too fast like her body's pushing all the waste of its dwindling mass out in any productive way it can, the same reason her hair's been thickening even as it falls the fuck out, and they break the nail clippers whenever she's tried bringing them to bear. Their squarish edges cleave into her palms as she makes fists of her hands and places her forehead softly against the door, the new wounds weakly oozing clear, pink-tinged plasma to drip off her knuckles. It tastes thin and sour when she licks it from her own papery skin.

Everything is reverting, going into predator mode, that same freaky biology which once saved her now trying just as determinedly to keep her from easily avoidable starvation, senses and instincts heightened, twitchy, eager. And something else, a separate wanting from hunger, has opened up like a flower in the place where her heart lies solid and cold in her breast, some drive more wistful, more moving, than anything of the flesh, a call urging her to _claim,_ to _have,_ to _cherish._

Trish is alive, _pulses_ with life, vibrant, real. She cares. At least a little. She... she could give Jessica what she needs, could make her okay again.

Would it really be so awful to ask?

Trish finally goes, socked feet padding against thick carpet, and it is only when she is gone that Jessica allows herself to breathe, to take in the ghost of her scent.

She's been eating meals with the Walkers and purging it later in private because everything but beverages like black coffee and certain foods like plain raw fruit and vegetables tend to disagree rather vehemently with her system. She keeps up the charade right up until fucking spaghetti night. Jessica gags at the smell of garlic, onions, and stewed tomatoes before she's even in the room, makes some piss-poor excuse about allergies, and makes a break for it. Trish trips while maneuvering around her chair to watch Jessica flee, stumbling in distraction as though she has to keep herself from running after her.

Jessica can only hope she stays; Trish doesn't eat nearly enough to keep the fullness and the bloom in her youthful cheeks, that keen, dancing glint alight in her blue eyes. Wouldn't want her to end up like Jessica the Amazing Walking Corpse.

That night she sleepwalks. Wakes up standing over Trish's bed, her fangs aching and her nails resting lightly over a slumbering Trish's throat.

Jessica maybe freaks the fuck out a little. Barricades her door from the inside by pushing her bed and dresser up against it, curls herself into a corner, and stays there, unmoving, even when the sunlight reaches her through the window and her flesh cracks and begins to peel, going ashen and flaking like layers of onionskin. She scratches it off, leaves angry pink furrows in the wake of her steely nails, until plasma beads up like dewdrops, glimmering all along her track-marked arms.

It's Saturday, so Dorothy doesn't bother her. Trish is, as ever, a different matter.

“I can hear you in there,” Trish says, muffled by wood and several bulky pieces of furniture. She's already tried the doorknob, found it locked, presumably doesn't know about Jessica's additional security measures. “Panting.” Yeah, Jessica might be breathing a little heavy, but only because her lungs have deflated, 'cause the air's swarming with musty dust motes swirling around in the relentless block of sunlight which pours over her like syrup left too long on the stove, too hot, too thick. “Are you hurt?”

“Jerking off,” Jessica snarls. So that she doesn't say, _I can hear you, too. I can hear your heart pumping blood. The breath you take in right before you speak. Your wet tongue shaping words with the air. The click of your eyelids. I can smell you. I can almost. Taste._

Trish pauses, chooses to ignore her curt, lewd response with a deliberateness that stands as its own, subversive sort of declaration. Tact as psychological warfare. “You've been in there all day. You must be hungry. Come on out, yeah?”

Jessica picks thoughtfully at the inside of her wrist, where a human's veins would stand out from the skin, blue as they branch out to the hand, but hers run like caved-in worm tracks in packed white clay, hard and hollow and colorless, dry arroyos waiting in vain for the rush of a flash flood to fill them.

“You have no idea how much I want to take you up on that,” she says.

“But you won't?” Trish asks, annoyance creeping into her patiently put-upon tone.

“No way in hell,” Jessica says acidly, far too emphatically for it to pass as natural and warranted for the conversation Trish thinks they're having.

After a shocked moment Trish scoffs, says, “Fine. Have it your way, then,” and leaves.

 

~~~

 

Jessica waits until after midnight to slip from her room, unsteady but quiet on her feet. There's a bowl of fruit which sits on the kitchen counter. Dorothy keeps it stocked fresh at all times. As far as Jessica can tell it's for aesthetic purposes only, and she's the only one who actually eats it. She'd wonder why Dorothy didn't just have plastic replicas of fruit instead, if she wasn't so pitifully grateful.

She runs her hands over the selection, skipping over the arch of a green banana, tapping the slick, crisp shape of a tart apple, until she settles on a plum. She pulls it out, letting the other fruits tumble down in the bowl, brings it to her face and smells it. It's almost... squishy, beneath its firm, smooth skin, too ripe but not rotten, the soft structure of its cells breaking down further, fermenting, slightly warm in her hand. It has a clean, sweet, cloying scent, flavored with chemical pesticides, but it's as far away from spaghetti and garlic bread, from dead cooked cow flesh or the clogging cholesterol of chalky boiled chicken embryos or the nasty curdled hydrogenation of dairy, as far away from any disgustingly processed human “food” as it is possible to be.

Sure, it has about the same nutritional value for her as ice chips crunched to stave off the hunger pangs, but at least there's flavor, some good ole fashioned sucrose to tide her over yet another fucking, pointless, interminable day of wasting away in silence. And she doesn't have to grind her teeth together to crush it, choke down lumps of half-chewed matter only to bring them up later, feel morsels of it caught in the cracks and crevices of her teeth and going putrid even after she flosses and fucking flosses.

Jessica is sick and tired of flossing. Her pearly whites weren't made for masticating, goddamn it.

She nuzzles over the curve of the plum, turning it in her hand, her fingerprints polishing away the dark, dusty purple matte, shining it nearly to black. She presses her nose and lips against it, then her teeth, sliding teasingly over the unblemished surface to feel it yield, then backing off to leave it taut and unmarked.

She can almost pretend, this way. That it's more than a sad piece of fruit on the cusp of going bad, lifeless and inert and nothing like the true sustenance she needs.

Jessica holds herself back until she has to swallow down floods of saliva so as not to drool like a dog, until her hand shakes, her stomach twisting and cramping with anticipation, before she bites like a striking snake and sucks the entirety of the juice from the plum, a beautiful flood of rich, wine-like nectar, the flesh crumbling into molecules and slipping through the four neat gashes made by her upper and lower fangs, sweeping fine-grained and wholesome across her tongue and down her parched throat, so smoothly she needn't even swallow until she's down to the last, precious dregs, the skin wrinkling and shrinking in her hand until nothing keeps it from adhering wetly to the flattened oblong of the stone. Then it breaks, a deflated bag too fragile to withstand the scrape of the pit at its heart and the pressure of Jessica's ravenous mouth, the bite marks bursting open into wide, ragged wounds as she slurps ungracefully at the velvety insides of the shredded peel, curling her tongue in to lick at the dripping strands of vivid sunset-hued pulp still clinging stubbornly to the whorls of the stone.

Her throat is still achingly dry.

She sighs, spitting the mangled remains into her hand and mournfully dissecting the skin to get the stone out and pop it into her mouth. She'll suck on it until she can't taste the nectar of the plum anymore and then go back to the bowl for a different fruit. Maybe a peach or something. Make it last, even as empty a comfort as this little ritual is.

The kitchen light clicks on, electricity buzzing thunderously, and she blinks the sudden blazing blindness away, turns and squints, disoriented, towards where Trish stands behind her, hand on the light switch and an insufferably smug expression on her face.

“Gotcha,” Trish says.

The plum stone clicks against Jessica's molars as she gulps audibly.

 

~~~

 

“So. Can I call you Bunnicula now?”

They're together on Trish's bed, the lamp on the dresser casting a soft golden glow and deepening the shadows to something out of an oil painting, Trish laying down, propped up on one elbow, staring with frank fascination, Jessica sitting hunkered down on the other side with the duvet yanked up around her shoulders and pulled tightly closed beneath her chin, glaring mutinously back.

“No. You may _not,_ and _never will,_ call me Bunnicula.” Jessica slurs a little around the stone tucked into her cheek but like hell is she spitting it out for this.

“But it fits perfectly. You've been sneaking to the kitchen at night to suck the juice out of apricots.”

“It was a plum.”

“The point still stands,” Trish insists.

“I'm not a goddamn _rabbit.”_

“You are a vampire, though.”

Jessica starts slightly, glances shiftily away even though the jig's already up. She wasn't expecting Trish to be so... blasé about it. To take it in stride. Hell, Trish is downright _gleeful,_ nothing but benign speculation in her gaze. That can _not_ be normal.

“You _are,”_ Trish murmurs, wonderingly. “I _knew_ there was something up with you, it was driving me _crazy,_ but. Vampire. That's... wow. I never could've imagined.”

“What? That we monsters walk among you?”

“That... just... _vampires,”_ Trish exclaims, dropping into a whisper-shout and waving one arm expansively in Jessica's direction.

Jessica frowns and sucks loudly on her plum pit, willfully obnoxious. “We find that term offensive, actually.”

“What? The... the v-word?” Trish straightens into a sitting position, sobering at the thought of being politically incorrect, even, or maybe especially, inadvertently. Do-gooder Patsy's ultimate nightmare. Not necessarily Trish's, but hey, she's a decent person under the teenage dramatics.

Jessica snickers at _v-word,_ then wrestles her expression back into something approaching seriousness so Trish will maybe buy the bullshit she's about to sell. “Yeah, we prefer to be referred to as 'blood-suckers.'”

Trish snorts incredulously, shaking her head.

“Now you know,” Jessica intones gravely. “So all's forgiven, I guess.”

“Don't make me hit you,” Trish threatens, grabbing a pillow and brandishing it.

Jessica swats it down to Trish's lap effortlessly. “Pfft, nice try. Super strength.”

“Really?”

“It's like, the one and only perk.”

“Huh.” Trish plumps her pillow and hugs it to her chest, using it to prop herself up as she leans forward. “Nothing else?”

Jessica shrugs and scritches delicately at a raised eyebrow with a too-long thumbnail. Figures there's no reason to hold anything back because it's not like Dorothy would believe anything Trish tried to tell her should she tattle anyway. “I mean, I can kind of fly.”

The corner of Trish's mouth quirks up in the subtle way which means she's about to ask some smartass question under the guise of innocent curiosity. “By turning into a bat?”

“By jumping really hard,” Jessica says flatly.

Trish muses over this for a moment, plucking at a stray thread on the edge of the duvet Jessica's appropriated. “What else can you do? And not do? I've seen you out in sunlight.” There's something open and warm, almost tentative, in the way Trish is looking at her. It's... nice. To have someone look at her and _see_ her, again.

“I've been smearing sunblock on. When we're healthy daylight's usually not a problem, but we're... especially sensitive to, you know, UV rays. I think we're made of different stuff, maybe.”

Trish looks rapt, and like she's trying not to show how absolutely greedy she is for more information. She tucks her hair casually behind her ear. Downplaying. “That's cool, I guess. What other stuff is true? Or false.”

In for a penny, in for a fucking pound, right? “I can cross running water just fine but I tend to sink like a rock. The religious stuff is a lie, far as I know, though personally I'm a fucking atheist so I guess I wouldn't. I can trespass without permission all I want and garlic doesn't kill me, it's just super fucking gross. Uh. Have you heard of that thing where if you dump a bunch of small stuff like rice or whatever on your doorstep, a vamp'll have to stop and count every last grain?”

“No, actually. That was a thing?”

Figures the old lore is being forgotten in favor of gelled hair and sparkly skin. “Well it _was_ a thing, urban legend, I mean, same as garlic blossoms and crucifixes. It's kinda true. My parents said OCD occurs more often in us. Phil... my little brother. He had it. As for the bats and glowy fog stuff, no one, like, ever, has gotten shapeshifting.”

“Gotten?” Trish cocks her head. “You make it sound like a lottery.”

“It's DNA same as you guys have, so it kind of is. I was the only one in my family to get this much super strength. Maybe a recessive gene or something. Super-senses are a thing, but they vary and aren't so much super as they are touchy. Attuned to humans, and, uh, appetite. And there are other things... powers, I guess, which were supposed to have been real. The only ones I know about for sure are invisibility and the power of persuasion, but they haven't cropped up since the old lines were bred out.”

“How old are you?”

Jessica blinks. “What?”

“Are you immortal?”

Jessica considers laughing in Trish's face but decides it would undermine all the friendship headway she's making with her. “No, my family was from young stock, thin blood. We age like humans. The old families were the ones who'd live to like five hundred, and they'd have all the mind tricks and shit, but it didn't stop them from all dying out a few centuries ago. They were the only ones who could turn humans, too. Or so it was said. Now the only blood-suckers are the ones with blood-sucker parents.” She stops for a second, a belated surge of fear rising in her at just how easily she's letting all of this spill out to a girl she barely knows, but beneath the blanket she digs her fingers into her thigh to reprimand herself, reminds herself that nothing fucking matters anymore. “We're really durable. Hard to kill, but. It's not impossible.”

Trish's eyes are gentle, half her face cast in shadow. She's worried the thread on the duvet loose and is twining it around the pad of her index finger until the flesh is blanched white with pressure underneath, flushing to an angry, swollen red above. “Starvation would do the trick, right?”

Jessica looks away. Nods jerkily. “Yeah.”

Trish unwinds the thread, pins it back in place with her thumb, loops it back around her finger in the other direction. Jessica watches her in her peripheral vision. Her hands, their graceful, calculated fidgeting, are the only source of movement until she lifts her chin to face Jessica, determination in the set of her mouth. “You really drink blood?”

“Human blood,” Jessica says dully, refusing to meet Trish's eyes. “Animal blood doesn't cut it, sadly.”

“When's the last time you... drank?”

Jessica shifts the plum pit, now dry and wooden against her tongue, to nestle in her opposite cheek, and shrugs, rolling her head back to look up at the ceiling. “Too long.”

“You _are_ dying,” Trish hisses. “That's not okay. Jesus, Jessica, that's—”

“I thought we agreed to stay out of each other's shit?” Jessica interrupts brusquely. She's getting tired. Of this. Of everything.

Vamps need their beauty sleep, too.

“That was before I knew.”

“Oh, so I'm not allowed to poke my nose into your business when _I'm_ concerned, but when _you_ go all Nancy Drew on the juvenile abomination living under your roof it's out of saintliness. Bless you, Patsy, god fucking bless you.”

 _“I'm_ not the one _starving_ here.”

“Not for your mother's lack of trying.”

Trish abruptly whips the pillow from her lap and throws it across the room in one furious motion, leans into Jessica's space with one hand slipping behind Jessica's head to grip hard at a handful of Jessica's hair, tangling it tightly within her fist, and yanks down the collar of her own pajama top to bare her throat. “I'm not going to be responsible for your death when I could do something about it. I'm not going to let you go ahead and kill yourself out of stubborn stupidity, either. I'm offering. Okay? Offering of my own free will. Take it.”

Jessica feels Trish's arm trembling with how hard she's holding onto Jessica's hair, trying to push Jessica's head down when Jessica may as well be hewn from marble. Trish's throat is right there, her carotid artery jumping with her furious pulse, the fine structure of her trachea humming with her breath, tendon and muscle, and blood, beneath creamy skin. The healing bruises mottling the right side of her neck are a sallow greenish yellow, almost precisely the color of a battered pear.

“All right,” she hears herself say.

Trish's hand relaxes, the pinprick flares of pain at the roots of Jessica's hair subsiding, and then soothed, as Trish begins running her fingers along Jessica's scalp, petting her as though in apology. She tips her head further back and lifts herself higher on her knees, maneuvering herself close enough for Jessica's lips to graze her skin before Jessica's snapping back into her right mind and letting the duvet fall from her shoulders as she grabs Trish chastely by the waist and tugs her gently but implacably back down.

“What?” Trish asks, quietly but sharply. Probably thinking Jessica's getting cold feet. “Don't worry, I wear my scarves all the time to hide the bruises, it's not like a couple bites will be any different.”

“It's not... there are arteries there. Important anatomy shit. I don't want to chomp down on the wrong thing by accident.” Jessica takes the opportunity to spit out the stone and tosses it into the wastebasket by Trish's desk.

“Okay. So where?”

“Give me your arm,” Jessica murmurs.

She pushes up Trish's sleeve, holds her arm slightly bent, palm up, in both of her hands. Reverently.

Trish's breath hitches a little when Jessica's teeth pierce her forearm, just below the inside of her elbow, four careful, shallow punctures. Jessica licks the blood away as it wells up, the first burst of full-bodied flavor so strong it's almost a physical shock, only sealing her lips and sucking when the wounds cease to weep so freely, and then easing off again. Iron and salt fills her mouth, hot and unbearably rich and so _fresh_ she can feel its brilliant life like another entity within her, bolstering her, filling her, a relief beyond words. She feels it pour down her throat, finally silencing the screaming dryness, a balm, its bold heat settling into her stomach like a welcome, like acceptance, the comfort easing through her extremities in tingling waves, leaving her lightheaded, her eyes slipping shut in bliss as vitality trickles into her deprived body, restoration, rebirth.

She takes about a pint over what may be hours, sitting there in the dim honeyed hush of Trish's room in the middle of the night.

By the time she swirls her tongue over the bites to lap the site clean of blood Trish's skin has blushed rose-red, puffy in the way which means it'll subside into a lavender bruise later. Jessica smothers possessive pride at the mark lest she go on to imagine replacing the vile hand prints Dorothy leaves, ameliorating the malevolent hurts and purifying them with the worship of her need, her gratitude.

She glances up at Trish's face and freezes for a moment at the perplexed longing she sees there before it shifts away and she is left to wonder if she imagined it. Her unruffled mask back in place, Trish blinks slowly down at her, smiling with just enough genuine affection to put Jessica at ease, but her pupils are still blown wide and glossy black within the crystalline rings of her irises. Impenetrable.

Jessica realizes that Trish is still stroking her hair. It's been going on for so long that she's numbed to it, lulled.

“I'll take care of you,” Jessica says. She's not sure why. She just knows it to be a promise she can make truth.

“Let's take care of each other,” Trish whispers back, cradling Jessica's jaw in her hands and bending playfully to bump noses, her face right against Jessica's, her warm breath mingling with Jessica's cool, her eyes vast and depthless.

“Yeah,” Jessica says, nodding. “Yeah, okay.”

She kisses Trish's cheek, a quick, dry peck she knows doesn't even begin to convey everything she wishes it could, and then goes to find the first-aid kit and some snacks rich in iron and vitamins and shit. Might as well start the caring now.

 

 

 


End file.
